West Virginia: Joint Standing Committee on the Judiciary

Rob Hoffman (452nd Judicial District Court, Texas) Sample Client (child welfare law firm)

Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you here from Texas. Where we are in the Central Time Zone, it just ticked 9 o'clock. So happy to be with you on this rainy day. My name is Rob Hoffman. I am the District Judge for the 452nd Judicial District Court of Texas and have the pleasure of serving as the Senior Juror-in-Residence for the Texas Children's Commission. I am currently a District Judge now for about 13 years, but previously served as a Child Protection Court Judge here in the state of Texas Under our Child Protection Court program, and that is what I am here to deliver information to you about. So I will tell you a little bit about myself. My district is a very rural district, about 100 miles west of Austin in the Texas Hill Country. I have a general jurisdiction court in 5 counties, so I hear all criminal cases, family law cases, property law, slip and falls, everything, including Child Protection Court hearings and juvenile justice as well. I have the pleasure of talking to you about what I think is one of the most successful programs that Texas has ever implemented before, and that is our Child Protection Court program. I do have a slideshow. I am not sure if you have access to that or if it is being presented to you there live. So I will run through my slides, and if you want to give me feedback about that process, You're welcome to do so. And of course, interrupt me at any time and, and ask questions, and I'll certainly leave some time at the end for questions as well. Texas currently has 30 child protection courts and an additional specialty court that's managed in Harris County, which of course is Houston, our largest county. The process started about 30 years ago. We began our cluster court program in 1997, funded through grants through the CIP program, but now fully funded through general revenue from the State of Texas. The process was— began to better serve rural jurisdictions in our state who had general jurisdiction judges and maybe only a few child protection court cases per year and really had no specialization or expertise in the child welfare system. We started with 2 courts, one in the greater Houston area and one in the Texas Rio Grande Valley area. Of course, as you can imagine, filings have increased in the state of Texas over those past 30 years. And although changes in legislation recently have meant a decrease in— a significant decrease in filings, we still have a large amount of cases coming through our system. The most recent estimate is that we now have 7.4 million children in the state of Texas, which is estimated to grow to about 8 million in 2035. So the process that we have for our system is that our courts receive guidance from the presiding judges in our administrative judicial regions within our Administrative Office of Courts. Texas is divided into several administrative judicial regions, and those judges of those regions actually employ our child protection courts. And this includes access to in-house online case management systems. So we have a special system for case management just for our child protection courts. We used to call it the Cadillac version. We're getting a new one here before too long. The appellate process for Our court system— okay, I can see myself a little better now. The appellate process for our court system is that these Child Protection Court judges are associate judges under our Texas Family Code. We have elected district court judges, but these associate judges are hired judges and assigned and referred cases from the elected judges. So there is a dual appellate process. The cases are assigned from the referring court to the Child Protection Court judge. Any decision that they make can be appealed de novo to their referring court judge, so just to step up to the trial court level, or the litigants can decide to appeal final orders in the typical appellate process up to the Intermediary Courts of Appeals, which we have here in Texas. Typically, our Child Protection Court judges are hearing thousands of hearings across the state, from removal hearings all the way up to trials. We have jury trials in Texas for termination of parental rights, so our associate judges have the authority to hear those trials. Sometimes the referring courts want them to hear those jury trials, but at any time the referring court can pull the case back into their jurisdiction, and many times our referring courts actually want to hear their jury trials as well. Part of the process is there's somewhat confusion as to if you have a jury trial with an associate judge and you de novo that trial up to the district court referring court judge, is there a right of a second jury trial? Texas courts have said there is not, but that is something that we work through. I'm not sure my PowerPoint is being presented, but I'm kind of a map nerd, so I have in here a map for you to see the vastness of our Child Protection Court system. We have 254 counties in Texas, and I believe that our courts cover around 130 or 140 of those, mainly rural areas. If you look, if you can see the map there, in the center is where my jurisdiction is, but we have literally courts from the Rio Grande Valley all the way up to the northern Panhandle. from West Texas way over to the Piney Woods and the bayou in East Texas. So those case courts have evolved over time, and we've added more and more courts. And as I said earlier, now we're up to about 30 courts here in the state of Texas. By the numbers, our courts generate a significant amount of hearings, and I want to tell you a little bit about the number of children served. At any given time, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 children in care in Texas. That number has dropped a little bit. Sometimes we're down to 15,000 or 16,000. But our Child Protection Court judges now, these associate judges, are hearing over 50% of the child welfare cases in our state. When you take those into consideration, in addition to the associate judges working in our larger counties, We really have a significant amount of our work being done by associate judges with the actual elected trial court judge only in rare instances in some rural areas hearing our Child Protection Court cases. In fiscal year '25, we had 8,600 children in Texas managed through the Child Protection Court system. It's dropped a little bit to fiscal year '26, which just ended because of our change in legislation. Those numbers are down, and now We had about 6,000 children last year managed. In fiscal year '26, our Child Protection Court judges heard just under 30,000 hearings in the state, many of them in person, many of them on Zoom. We had 2,400 final orders entered, and I know final orders mean something different in every state, but that would mean either a reunification, a placement with a relative, or a termination, perhaps an adoption. Through our Child Protection Court system last year, we had over 600 children reunified and well over 800 children adopted through the system. Also, almost 900 children were placed with relatives. In Texas, we have a very strict permanency, timeliness, requirement, which requires us to have permanency within 12 months of removal with the opportunity for one 6-month extension, which is often exercised. The average time to permanency through our child welfare system was 16 months, which I think is probably an amazing number on a national standard and probably well under the number for a typical court. So back in 2019, the state of Texas saw the great value of our child protection courts and actually added 18 full-time employees, 9 new associate judges, and 9 new court coordinators. That cost about $3.7 million for those 18 full-time employees. Generally, it is very clear to us that these associate judges are less costly than creating a new district court. The state of Texas is expanding rapidly in our population. We now have at least 30 million people in our state. And every time I speak, I have to tell people that 1 out of every 10 children in the United States lives in the state of Texas. It's almost impossible to believe. And from the year 2000, to the year 2020 census, Texas accounted for 80% of the population growth of children. In that 10-year period, Texas accounted for 80% of the population growth. So we need new courts, and this is an efficient way to fund our child welfare system. The state pays the salary of our associate judges and our court coordinators, but we have agreements with local counties to provide Courtroom space, and of course, office space, as well as security. I want to talk a little bit about oversight for our specialty courts. Our Office of Court Administration provides— is the employer of our associate judges and provides oversight for them. They provide technical assistance, so computer equipment, recording equipment, telephone equipment, And all of our associate judges are about to get on-the-road mobile panic buttons. So when they're driving from county to county, law enforcement can find them if there are security issues. OCA also provides oversight with monitoring the program for compliance with best practices. As I've said, our coordinators and our judges are employees of the State of Texas. And we also have court reporters that assist them when needed. OCA also coordinates the exchange of information between the specialty courts and the judiciary. And really, this process over the last 30 years in Texas has greatly moved Texas closer to the national practices with centralized administration for specialty courts and has been greatly beneficial with regards to quality assurance, the training that our judges receive, funding, technology, and also advocacy goals. Back in 2014, so it's a little bit dated, there was a court observation study where our child protection courts and our district courts, general jurisdiction courts, were observed to, to have measures of outcomes. And our child protection courts really outperformed our typical elected courts in every category. Our CPC courts covered more relevant due process indicators, which would be things such as service of process, having children in court for their own hearings, and other issues. Our child protection courts outperformed with regards to well-being indicators, which are so critically important for our kids, which would be their educational outcomes, medical issues, how many drugs they're being administered, And also normalcy issues, just typical things that a child would want to do in their normal course of business. When court files were considered, our child protection courts covered all of the relevant factors with regards to the law a little bit better than our elected courts would do. And probably most importantly, our child protection courts are able to give more time to the hearings, which you can all imagine would be very important for, for the subject matter that we're talking about here. So our hearings typically last around 30 minutes for our child protection courts and significantly less for the non-child protection courts. Our CPC courts schedule timely hearings throughout the day, generally about 15 hearings every half-day, and that is a— so we're able to manage our hearings better and spend more time focusing on that content. We have some pretty significant training and resources for our child protection courts. We just finished our annual Child Welfare Judges Conference, a 2.5-day conference there in Georgetown, Texas, with national speakers, Really aggressive, important content on a wide variety of topics. That content is managed by our Texas Children's Commission. We have dedicated staff that spend a significant amount of their time solely focused on training of our child protection courts and other judges who hear child welfare cases. A district judge here in the state who is also a jurist in residence manages that committee for us. We also have every other year what we call a biannual child protection court convening. done after our legislative session so we can have updates and get our CPC judges ready for those laws to be implemented on September 1st. We also have various summits on various topics throughout the year and throughout the seasons. We have an education summit coming up. And we have also had trauma training. We have had a dual status joint juvenile justice summit as well. So we have in-person training throughout the year, multiple topics, as well as webcasts, et cetera. We also have roundtables through the Texas Children's Commission to hit emerging topics. We have community-based care or privatization going on across our state, where our state will at some point completely privatize the entire child welfare system. That has been ongoing for several years. We have a roundtable on that issue coming up. We also have various roundtables on notification of parents, so due process issue, visitation and children in court, and relative caregiver information. All sorts of roundtables throughout the year. We have resource letters that go out from the Children's Commission to our judges. And the Children's Commission, with CIP funding, also provides scholarships to national conferences such as the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Annual Conference and Juvenile Conference, as well as others. We provide very intensive legislative updates throughout the year during our legislative sessions. The State Bar of Texas works with us in conjunction to have web broadcasts, We have a significant amount of online resources. I hope some of you will take the time to look at the Texas Children's Commission website. There is probably not a question you can ask that is not answered somewhere within our resources. And I would say most importantly, we have a humongous benchbook. I have got it here on the bench for you to see. This is our brand-new benchbook. It just came out covering a significant amount of topics, and I think Any question that you had about our process could be answered in there. There is even a chapter on dealing with the Mexican Consulate because, of course, we are so close to the country of Mexico. So we have very well-trained judges who work for our kids in this state. So I think my last slide is just some of the overall benefits of the Child Protection Court system. And after that, I will I'll do my best to answer any questions that you have. So, as I said earlier, the Office of Court Administration provides oversight for our judges, but they also provide evaluation through— for the judges throughout the year. Our elected judges, of course, are not evaluated, but our Child Protection Court judges actually go through an evaluation process and a very stringent selection process to begin with. So some very highly trained attorneys get to move over into our Child Protection Court system. As you can imagine, the great amount of specialization and training means that we have very well-trained judges with a great amount of expertise. These are high-level folks who are very focused on knowing every aspect of their jurisdiction. You know, I have a general jurisdiction. Every once in a while, I have a pleading that comes up that I have never seen before in my 25 years as a judge. These judges know their work backwards and forwards, probably more well-trained than the attorneys appearing before them, than the caseworkers appearing before them. That is— the crowning achievement for our child protection court system is having our judges that know their stuff backwards and forwards. We have a significant amount of data collection through our case management system that can really assist us in training. And you can imagine all other aspects that data can teach you. We have a significant data system that can, can help our judges as well. Also, our judges provide judicial leadership within their field. We have multiple committees through the Texas Children's Commission. Our associate judges, our Child Protection Board judges sit on all those committees. They also provide training, as I said, in our conferences, but they're actually going out in their community, providing training to their attorneys, to CASAs, to other folks who work within the system. All of our Child Protection Board judges have collaborative meetings within their jurisdictions where they're having brown bags once a month. Having folks within the system, and there is a lot of folks in this system, and a lot of silos that we got to get together. Mental health, juvenile justice, all the things that you can imagine. Also, I think it is fair to say that we have better due process compliance through our child protection courts, service issues specifically, as well as all the other procedural due process. That is required early appointment of attorneys for parents, certainly for children. All those aspects are well covered by our courts. Of course, you know, under ASFA, safety, permanency, and well-being are the 3 pillars of our ASFA federal law. Certainly, we have greater compliance with permanency. I told you about the permanency timeliness benefits. and also the wellbeing as well. We have a big state with kids placed across the state. We have done so much work with our education system in Texas, getting wellbeing outcomes there. But also, I would say, as I mentioned earlier, medical issues. Our judges are well-trained in application of medications and pharmacological issues. Our judges are asking, you You know, why is this child on this medication? We need to have a medication review. Tell me if this is appropriate. So medications, but also those normalcy issues as well. We can talk about kids going to sleepovers, kids jumping on trampolines, kids getting to be normal in their circumstances, which is certainly important. We also, I think it is fair to say, have a higher level of advocacy for our parents and our children. Our child protection courts know the policy of the agency, not necessarily the law of the state, but the policy of the agency. Our judges drill down into that policy, and they can probably quote policy better than the caseworker sitting before them. So they can really manage the policy of the department moving as well. And, you know, there's national best practices. We have state best practices, and these folks are on the forefront of of implementing those. And actually, they are on the forefront of developing those best practices. The Child Protection Court system is probably one of the best things that the State of Texas has done within the last 30 years. I was privileged to be a part of it for 13 years, and now I am privileged to get to see how it continues to develop and come to visit with you guys in West Virginia to tell you all about it. It is a great program. I think you should certainly consider it, not for necessarily just for the benefit that it will save money for West Virginia, but certainly for the benefit of the children that you serve in your systems. So that is my presentation and testimony. I'm certainly available to take questions if anyone has any for me.

The Texas model of state-paid associate judges, de novo review by the referring judge, and 30-minute hearings shows how West Virginia's commissioner system could operate and affect counsel workload.

Christopher Church (Casey Family Programs) Sample Client (child welfare law firm)

Good morning. There we go. Chairman Akers and members of the committee, thank you for inviting Casey Family Programs to offer its perspective on the implementation of House Bill 5684. So my name is Christopher Church, and I serve as a senior director on Casey Family Programs judicial and national engagement team. I'm joined by my colleagues Tony and Vanessa over here who have primary responsibility for overseeing our partnerships and investments in West Virginia, and also Carol from our public policy team. Casey is the nation's largest private operating foundation focused on safely reducing the need for foster care. Our judicial and national engagement team works with jurisdictions across the country, and my portfolio focuses primarily on improving judicial practice and appellate practice, and ensuring high-quality legal representation for all parties. My professional background is in child protection law and court improvement. I'm a child welfare law specialist certified by the National Association of Counsel for Children, or NACC. I began my career working for the Court Improvement Program in Georgia, then split my time between representing families in dependency and related civil proceedings through some law school clinics, and then also consulting with several national organizations, including the Children's Bureau, NCJFCJ, National Center for State Courts, NACC, and many others. And then in 2020, I joined Casey Family Programs. But enough about me. Let's talk House Bill 5680— nope, 6584. Let's talk the House bill. As enacted, the bill provides 2 goals: encouraging efficiency and ensuring accountability. These objectives are related, but they are not interchangeable. The value of additional judicial capacity will absolutely depend not only on how promptly cases are resolved, but also on whether children and parents are treated with fundamental fairness during hearings, receive legally sound decisions, and are afforded meaningful protection of their rights. And with funding now available to support implementation, of the Child Protection Commissioner Program, West Virginia has an opportunity to establish a thoughtful program and evaluate its effectiveness. So I'm just going to offer 5 considerations on behalf of Casey Family Programs this morning, drawn from national research and our experience. The first is to consider opportunities to strengthen judicial oversight of removal decisions. For at least the past decade, West Virginia has held the nation's highest annual rate of children entering foster care. That rate alone certainly cannot tell us how many of those removals were necessary, but it absolutely underscores the importance of careful judicial scrutiny, particularly because the House Bill 5684 authorizes commissioners to approve emergency removals. Now, West Virginia statutory framework already provides a strong foundation. The code requires an initial court-ordered removal to be based on findings of imminent danger to the child's physical well-being and the absence of reasonably available alternatives to removal. Such a standard reflects and honors the fundamental constitutional interests at stake when the government involuntarily separates children from their parents, and it is stronger than many statutory schemes we see in other jurisdictions. It also aligns with the clinical research that recognizes removal should be a safety intervention of last resort. So the legislature may wish to explore, in collaboration with the Supreme Court of Appeals, ways to make these statutory requirements central to commissioner training and practice. Removal decisions should rest on individualized findings identifying the imminent danger, the evidence supporting it, the alternatives considered, and why those alternatives would be insufficient to protect a child. This is particularly important with emergency removals. Although subsequent judicial review as accommodated in the bill is essential, it cannot fully undo the disruption to a family that may result from an unnecessary removal. From our work around the country, there is strong empirical support that emergency removal findings often become routinized or reduced to standardized boilerplate language in court orders. So judicial oversight from specialized commissioners should ensure that children are protected from imminent harm while also ensuring that families are protected against unnecessary separation. So in short, a strong legal standard protects children and families only to the extent that it is meaningfully enforced, and commissioners will be integral to that meaningful enforcement. To evaluate this aspect of the pilot, West Virginia could consider monitoring foster care entry rates over time, monitoring the frequency of emergency removals, the frequency of objections that are filed to removal orders, timeliness and quality of initial hearings, whether those hearings are contested, and whether removal orders contain those individualized findings addressing both statutory requirements. You can do this through sampling orders and reviewing hearing records to And I'd be happy to discuss that a little bit more later. Second, I would make reasonable— or Casey would recommend making reasonable efforts a meaningful part of judicial oversight. Closely related to the removal decision is the statutory obligation to make reasonable efforts to prevent removal, removal, and when children enter care, to safely reunify families. Reasonable efforts determinations serve an important role in protecting family integrity, yet a recurring concern in child welfare practice is that these findings can become procedural formalities rather than meaningful assessment of the services offered. Effective oversight requires more than just confirming that services were offered, but rather requires examining whether the efforts were timely, accessible, and most importantly, responsive to the family's circumstances that identified— that led to the initial state involvement. House Bill 5684 authorizes commissioners to oversee case plans, order services, and conduct status hearings. So this presents an opportunity to identify those barriers to family preservation early and more consistently. Some measures that you might want to include in your monitoring would include the frequency of no reasonable efforts findings, whether reasonable efforts findings are individualized and supported by the evidence, the time between service referrals and actual service delivery, and whether families are receiving services tailored to the circumstances that justified state intervention. State also may wish to monitor the early identification and engagement of relatives, the frequency and location of family visitation, and placement with relatives when removal is necessary. Together, these measures could help determine whether judicial oversight is contributing to meaningful efforts to preserve or safely reunify families. Third, consider coordinated investments in specialization in child welfare, child protection law, both on the bench and among counsel. Child welfare proceedings require specialized legal knowledge and an understanding of the complexities that the families are facing. Commissioners will need structured initial and continuing education addressing constitutional and statutory standards, trial or hearing management such as enforcing the rules of evidence or managing motion practice. Alongside many of our national partners, we also recognize the importance of training on child development, trauma, safety assessment, and brain science related to decision-making. Much of this training will certainly be provided locally, but we would also encourage support to attend national organizations that offer conferences, including the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the ABA Center on Children and the Law, and NNCC, who offer excellent training and more importantly opportunities for peer learning. Casey also encourages consideration of a pathway to child welfare law specialist certification. This credential is administered by the National Association of Counsel for Children through an ABA-accredited program. It requires substantial relevant experience, specialized continuing education, peer review, and a rigorous examination, which every lawyer, I'm sure, Sure wants another option to take a bar-like exam. West Virginia is one of only 4 states in which the credential is currently not available. The state may wish to establish certification and support interested commissioners and attorneys representing children, parents, and the state to seek it. A recent evaluation of the program involved more than 300 child welfare professionals, found that the CWLS specialist reported higher competencies in 4 of the 5 measured domains of legal practice, which included legal knowledge, procedural advocacy, individualized case planning, and holistic approaches to representation. Many states provide an incentive for attorneys to pursue certification. This can encourage more attorneys to seek certification, but also help with recruitment, retention, and career advancement. Advancement. Several state court improvement programs have encouraged specialization by offering group study courses, like a bar prep course for those that are sitting for the exam, offsetting the cost of certification through partial scholarships, listing CWLS as a preferred quality in hiring or promoting decisions, and increasing rates for attorneys who have earned the certification. Ensuring high-quality legal representation is Critical to the success of the child protection or commissioner's program, because the quality of judicial decision-making depends substantially on the quality of evidence and advocacy before the court. Measures worth including in this context would include timely appointment and participation of counsel, access to specialized training and certification, attorney caseloads, availability of interdisciplinary representation, and we believe that the perspectives of children and parents regarding their representation could also offer an important voice in assessing the quality of the program. Fourth, consider clarifying the scope and timeliness of judicial review. The bill reserves authority to enter final orders on certain matters to circuit judges. While authorizing commissioners to make other decisions, such as emergency removal, visitation, and custody. So subsection F establishes a 10-day objection process for commissioner reports and recommendations. However, the bill does not expressly specify an equivalent process for every decision authorized under subsection E, and nor does it establish the standard of review for those recommendations. The committee may wish to explore with the judiciary how implementing rules will operate alongside existing procedures, particularly regarding the availability and timeliness of independent review. Many jurisdictions will provide de novo review of recommendations and expedited review of time-sensitive decisions, such as those involving visitation, removal, and custody. De novo review maximizes fairness and ensures full correction of legal or factual errors at the trial court level. An expedited review more timely resolves those matters, like removals and visitation, that have significant implications for children's safety, family relationships, and fundamental rights. Fifth, I would encourage— Casey would encourage you to define success before implementation begins. So the bill already requires baseline outcome measures and annual reporting, and this is an important provision in the legislation to assess whether the commissioner program is achieving its intended objectives. West Virginia need not develop its evaluation framework from scratch. The National Center for State Courts, National Council for Juvenile and Family Court Judges have published materials with established measures for court performance. The federally supported J-CAMP program offers additional considerations for evaluating due process, legal representation, family engagement, and permanency. So you could certainly draw upon those measures, and where existing data permit, a multi-year pre-pilot baseline, ideally around 3 years' worth of data, comparisons with similar non-pilot counties, and staggered implementation could all help tease out changes associated with the commissioner program and distinguish it from broader statewide trends. Also, linking the court records with child welfare administrative data will give much more rich information about the longer-term outcomes of children and families that are appearing before the courts. Casey encourages consideration of stakeholder participation in selecting and interpreting these measures, including parents and youth with lived experience, attorneys, judicial officers, agency personnel, folks in this room. This is not something that should be left to the IT or technical folks. It really should be a joint initiative. Finally, no single performance measure can capture the full impact of of the initiative, faster reunification is not necessarily an improvement if children subsequently reenter foster care. Fewer removals is not necessarily an improvement if children remain exposed to serious harm. And faster hearings are not necessarily an improvement if they compromise, compromise meaningful consideration of the evidence. So the evaluation should therefore consider safety, permanency, family preservation, procedural fairness and efficiency together and try to thread the needle through all those different measures to better understand how this program is working. Just in closing, I will say that this bill offers West Virginia an opportunity to do more than simply expand judicial capacity, creates an opportunity to strengthen the fairness, consistency, and accountability of judicial oversight in some of the most consequential hearings the state decisions the state makes. Casey Family Programs appreciates the committee's attention to these important questions and welcomes continued dialogue as West Virginia develops and evaluates its pilot. And I, in the interest of time, I will wrap up there. Thank you for the opportunity to testify and would be happy to answer any questions.

Recommendations on commissioner training, specialist certification, attorney caseloads, review of commissioner decisions and pilot evaluation point to rules and standards likely to shape how the firm's attorneys practice before commissioners.

Cindy Largent Hill (West Virginia Administrative Office of the Courts, Children's Division) Sample Client (child welfare law firm)

Thank you, sir. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for letting me be here this morning to speak a little bit more about West Virginia and the child protection commissioners. It's no secret to anyone in this room we have a significant number of children in foster care. That number tends to always exceed about 5,200. Again, it's no secret if you've ever heard me speak week that we are struggling to have enough child abuse and neglect attorneys to represent our children and to represent parents in those cases. Currently today, we have 191 attorneys who have expressed an interest in doing this work. In January, when I spoke to the House Judiciary Committee on the first day of the session, we had 187. So unfortunately, in spite of a lot of recruitment opportunities and efforts, that number has not changed by— significantly at all. I did want to share with you a couple of efforts that have been made within the judiciary and within my division, the Children's Division at the Administrative Office. A couple of things we've tried to do to help the child welfare abuse and neglect system has been we have established the Parent Resource Navigator. We have that currently in 26 counties, and by the end of next year we hope to be in 35 counties. For the sake of time purposes, I'm not going to describe that any further, but I'm certainly willing to discuss it with you and share with you the opportunities that those navigators have to help parents navigate the child abuse and neglect system. In addition to that, we also have a case assist program where my staff and I help workers, attorneys, judges navigate the child welfare systems, particularly for those children who are kind of stuck in the system. You are aware that we have a fair number of children who are out of home, and many of those children are out of state. That makes the case a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to navigate. We recently implemented a court preparedness training specifically geared to the DOHS, Bureau of Social Service, Child Welfare, their CPS workers as well as their youth service workers. What we do is we have a dedicated senior status judge and my staff who are talking to them about how to prepare for court. So we've— those are some of the things that we've done just to help the system in the world, in the circle of influence that we have. So you may be thinking to yourself, but probably not because you are familiar with our child welfare Thank you. I'm going to talk about the juvenile welfare system, the why behind the child protection commissioners. As I said, the juvenile cases are extremely complex. Almost all of the petitions that our judges see in West Virginia are for emergency removals. Those kids, those families are in crisis. We've seen an increase in the number of status offense cases as well as in the number of delinquency cases that are coming in front of the court. Typically, a judge in our state— we have 80 judges in West Virginia, about 75 of them have juveniles on their docket— typically each judge spends at least one full business day a week hearing juvenile cases. Because of the struggles I mentioned, we don't have enough attorneys. We have a number, a significant number of children who are out of home and out of state. We have inconsistent community-based services. These cases take time and they take attention. There's another piece to the child welfare system that you're familiar with, and that's the multidisciplinary team that is to occur at least, at least every 90 days and prior to the court hearing. Court hearings for child abuse and neglect, especially those when children are removed, are to be, again, at least, at a minimum, every 90 days. So you can hear, you can hear and put together by the number of attorneys we don't have, by the time constraints that we have, by the limitations, it makes navigating the child welfare system extremely complicated. These are just a few reasons why we were excited when Chairman Akers approached us about the opportunity for the child protection commissioners. We think this is a good opportunity to add a mechanism to assist the circuit judges, but primarily to have a closer oversight to help those children in the abuse and neglect system. We have just recently secured the seed money from Public Defender Services. Some of you may have heard of what's called Title IV-E legal representation monies. It's a reimbursement mechanism that West Virginia participates in. That money goes back to public Defender Services because of the amount of money West Virginia spends on representation for children and families. Mr. Eddy agreed to provide the seed money for us to review, start, review and set up the Child Protection Commissioner. We are looking to use that funding for staff oversight for commissioners and office setup for their staff. The oversight for the Child Protection Commissioners will be housed within the Division of Children's services, but we will also obviously work very closely with the circuit judge for where that commissioner will be working. Right now, we're looking at a small circuit and a medium-sized circuit, and when I say small, I don't necessarily mean one county, because, as you know, the way West Virginia is laid out with their circuits, we could have a circuit with 3 or 4 counties, and that would be considered a small circuit compared to a circuit of one. We are excited to connect with the experts. We had a conversation prior to this with Casey, as well as with the judge from Texas. It was extremely helpful. We look to continue that discussion, as well as we're going to be looking at practice, at rule changes, and data. Data is going to be a key piece of this project. We've already started looking at benchmarks so that as we set up the program, we'll have an idea of— we want to be sure we compare apples to apples as we go down this road. I would ask you, though, to indulge us a bit and to keep in mind that we are going to be building this from the ground up, one block at a time. This doesn't exist in West Virginia. We know we have a lot of limitations in our state and a lot of struggles when it comes to children in care. We want to be sure that we do this right. So we intend to take time, not a lot of time, to not make it happen, but the time to make sure that we do it right. And in closing, I just want to thank you as a body for supporting that bill. I really am excited about the opportunities. You know, advocating for this bill was an opportunity that you had for children and families. It was the opportunity to challenge and strengthen how the system can work with a goal for a better, stronger, and more responsive— keyword— more responsive child welfare system. I truly believe this is a step forward for children and families, and I thank you very much.

The court official described the pilot's funding, small and medium circuit sites, attorney shortage of 191 interested lawyers, and rule changes ahead, which signal contracting and appointment opportunities for the firm.